Findings Read online

  We have not banished death, but we have banished the dark. We have light, we have oilfields and electricity and lasers. And by the light we have made, we can see that there are, metaphorically speaking, cracks. We are doing damage, and have a growing sense of responsibility. The surveyors poring over the tomb are working in an anxious age. We look about the world, by the light we have made, and realise it’s all vulnerable, and all worth saving, and no one can do it but us.

  And, if it all goes to hell on a handcart, we have the data, we can build a replica. Maybe five thousand years from now we will indeed be living among replicas. We may be replicas ourselves. It’s not impossible. But I have my doubts.

  I could have waited a couple of days and then joined that little group squeezing into the tomb at the solstice proper. But I had my own midwinter rituals to observe. We put up the Christmas tree on the 21st, the children decorate it, and I couldn’t miss that. There was the dinner with friends to look forward to as well. I would leave the next day.

  There was time, nonetheless, for an evening walk. Of course it was dark; it had been for hours. The houses at the edge of town were lit, and their curtains drawn. Beyond the houses, beyond the reach of the yellow streetlights, there is the golf course. The golf course! Shorn and mellow by day, in the dark it reverted to the wild. Its gentle mounds and slopes seemed almost to breathe, to edge more closely than they do by daylight. A narrow road bound by a stone wall and a ditch bisected it. There were unseen ruts to negotiate.

  Where the road ended at the shore there was a large fishermen’s hut with lobster creels stacked on its lee side, and beyond that – the sea. Not the open sea, but a fierce channel between two islands. I huddled against the hut, sheltering from the wind. Out in the night was the low, shapely isle of Graemsay, with lighthouses at either end, and behind it the cliffs of Hoy rose to their full 1300 feet. Vast tonnages of water fight through a narrow channel here, to flood or drain the great natural anchorage of Scapa Flow. The surging sea, the wind, the cliffs’ bulk against the night sky were (forgive me) sublime. There was much sound: wind, and waves, but also a silent light show: the beams of many lighthouses shone and faded shyly across the water, each to its own pulse. The pathways they made on the black surface of the sea slipped in and out of existence. Here were all the textures of darkness – bulwarks of land, shifting sea, dark starry sky, and the consolation of lighthouses. And in the distance, among further dark islands, rose the flare-stack of the Flotta oil refinery. Oil is brought there from the North Sea fields by tanker or pipeline, and by day and night excess gas is burned off into the atmosphere, in an orange flame.

  Nowadays, though, they’re experimenting with tide-power, with setting turbines right here in the tidal race between these islands. The hope is that the sea can generate a constant power, a constant heat and light which will be renewable and unpolluting. That’s the idea. Wind turbines are fine, but sometimes the wind drops. There’s the sun, but, as we know, sometimes it’s obscured by clouds. Tides and the moon, however, you can rely on.

  I don’t know if the 25 or so people who crept into Maes Howe for the solstice were rewarded with a beam of sunlight. And if it came, did they part to let it through, like a doctor at an accident? I was at home again by then, and we were going out for dinner.

  The hallway of our friends’ cottage was inviting in candlelight, as was the room, and the table. The curtains were open to show black night pressed against the windows. We were a merry company, and in the warm candlelight we enjoyed a half-joking, symbolic meal. We ate stuffed red peppers, to symbolise, our host said, the rising sun. Sautéed carrot sticks were its warming rays, and green beans, presented with a flourish, represented the shoots of spring. We cheered the beans, and drank a toast, because tonight was mid-winter’s night, the night of the complicit kiss, and tomorrow the light would begin its return.

  Peregrines, ospreys, cranes

  She has been calling for this week and last – the first half of a dry April. The sound enters my attic room through its window, and if I turn from my desk to glance out of that window I see the hill. She has been calling from up there.

  Our narrow garden and the neighbours’ gardens run up toward that hill. I say gardens but properly speaking they’re orchards, and the plum and pear trees are coming into blossom. A couple of doors along they keep hens and the cockerel crows all day. I hear him, but also I hear the peregrine’s thin shriek, over and over, like a turnstile pleading for oil.

  Peregrine falcons are rare birds which do not breed in these parts. But they are here. I can see them, and the entire town, if it’s a mind to listen, can hear her cry. It’s the kind of sound that drills into your head, and even when she’s silent you carry the sound in your brain. The ledge the birds have chosen is 70 feet or so up on a north-facing cliff. Parts of the cliff are unstable and prone to landslip. At its base is an undergrowth of brambles; at the top thin birches, hawthorns, and the wild cherries known in Scotland as gean. Above that, the land slopes back and rises steeply into a hill.

  I watched her yesterday. She was upright on the edge of her favoured ledge with her back to the world, the long brown wings folded down to her tail. She was calling and calling. People are beginning to talk – is that a bird? A lost lamb? Someone said he thought it was an injured animal at a roadside, a hare or fox. But, though half the town can hear it, the male peregrine must know this sound is intended for him alone. How it must nail through his brain. You. You. He was perched on a lichen-spotted lip of rock some feet away, and had also turned his back. She is bigger, and more brown. His back was the colour of slate roofs after rain. What you see when they swivel their heads round is the white of their cheeks.

  As she called and called, he stood like a child in a huff. Then he opened his wings and fell into the air. He flew in an easy loop, and when the sunlight glanced his undersides they were pale and banded like rippled sycamore. He swooped round, then arrived back and landed on the female. Their mating lasted a few brief seconds; there was a fluster of wings and it looked as though they might overbalance, but then he fell away into space and made a wide loop again before settling on his own ledge. But she was sated only for a moment, then she started again. You. You.

  So there we are. Nesting peregrines. Another damn thing to worry about.

  In some places, peregrines’ nests are guarded round the clock for fear of egg-snatchers or unscrupulous falconers who’d take the young. Ospreys, the big fisher-birds, are vulnerable to egg thieves too. I learned about our local ospreys’ nest from a certain old man, whom I often meet if I’m out cycling. A round-faced fellow in his seventies, on fine days he walks the hills and byways behind the town. I don’t know his name. He carries a small pair of binoculars and we always have the same conversation.

  I stop the bike and brightly enquire, ‘Anything interesting?’ He’s generous with his observations and will tell me about buzzards or butterflies. Then we say, where is everyone? There are 2500 people in this town, but even on a glorious day we have the hills and woods to ourselves. ‘Ach – the young wans are no interestit,’ he’ll say, shaking his head. His own concern is almost Jainish. Once he was annoyed that horse-riders had allowed their animals to gallop through a certain puddle, scattering the water with no heed for the pond-skaters there. No thought for the insects at all.

  To see the ospreys I cycled to the vantage point the old man had described. There was a view downhill and across green fields to the estuary. At the riverside was a stand of trees with a Scots pine among them, and sure enough I could see through binoculars that the pine sported a ridiculous toupee made of sticks. Furthermore, there was a bird standing upright on top of it, like a glove puppet, surveying the river. Had the old man not told me, I’d never have noticed it, but now it was obvious.

  That was last year, and now spring had come again I resolved to take my first chance to see if these big birds had safely made the journey north.

  The rockface remained in shade till afternoon. The male pereg
rine was there today, sitting side-on, glumly inspecting his feet. He lifted first one yellow talon then the other, like one who has chewing gum on his shoe. His breast is creamy and it showed up in contrast to the rock and his grey back. Then he settled himself, facing outward to the view, and although he seemed at rest his head kept moving. Terribly, lecherously, his eye fell on every passing bird. He checked the sky constantly. In a single minute, he shifted his gaze twenty times, left, right, directly overhead, more often than a Formula One driver changes gear. There’s a line I think of whenever I glimpse a bird of prey on a fence post, or watch a kestrel hovering. If you’ve seen the hawk, be sure, the hawk has seen you.

  Everyone’s saying this weather can’t last. ‘We’ll pay for it!’ we agree, in our gleeful Calvinism. Fancy – day after day of summer sunshine, in April. The house grows dusty and neglected because we spend so much time outdoors. It’s unseasonal, but all weather is unseasonal nowadays. The plum blossom is coming and next door’s old pear tree is a perfect triangle of greenish-white froth. They do this like a conjuring trick, the old trees. They’re brittle and cronish all winter, then blossom issues out of them and fills the tree slowly, like a dancehall filling on a Saturday night.

  The peregrines have no interest in plum blossom and buds. They leave that to the bullfinches and blue tits. There are other tenants of the cliff, jackdaws mostly, and some wood pigeons. The jackdaws sit side by side, like pairs of shoes, on their various niches. I wonder if they’re unnerved by their neighbours. Where the jackdaws are cosy and domestic in their arrangements, the peregrines stand upright at a distance to each other, but linked with the heightened tension, almost, of flamenco dancers. That’s it – the peregrines have duende.

  I saw the male about 7pm from my window. He was flying with quick wings. The swept-back, tapering wings whip faster than you’d imagine, with a quick flicking or rowing motion. He had something clutched in his feet. It was a small blackness, concussed or already dead. He flew not to his ledge but away up onto the hill, to eat in peace.

  The town’s jackdaws all rise at once, swirl over the gardens clucking before they land again on the trees and rock ledges. The peregrines are all vista – their high ledge affords them a view of the entire estuary, from the mountains almost to the sea, in all its greys and blues, its reeds and its river islands. A view, if indeed they see ‘views’ at all, of water and air. At ebb-tide, the estuary’s exposed sandbanks are long wing-shapes crowded with feeding birds. Immediately below the peregrines, however, are the pitched slate roofs of the town, and its many disused chimneys. Chimneys are the jackdaws’ haunt, and I envy them their elevated life, at once part of a household and part of the wide air.

  As April passed, I looked up books and field guides, because I knew nothing about peregrines. Do they mate and then build a nest, or vice versa? Some birds of prey mate many, many times. Ospreys, apparently, do it hundreds of times before the eggs are laid. I don’t know if peregrines construct a nest at all, or if they just deposit eggs on the rock ledge, like sea birds do. These are new questions to me. When I want to know a thing, I resort to books and feel strangely exposed without books to fall back on, as though standing on a ledge. I must just learn to be patient, learn to observe first-hand.

  As they have their persecutors, their poisoners and egg thieves, birds of prey have their allies too. It’s like life during wartime: you don’t know whom you can trust. The best view of the nest site can be had from a garage, and I was hanging about there today, trying to look nonchalant, trying to raise the binoculars without being obvious, but the mechanic appeared whistling from his workshop and caught me in the act.

  ‘Looking for the peregines?’ he asked. ‘Boy, she was making a racket this morning.’

  He glanced over his shoulder, but his boss was busy in his office and so the mechanic beckoned me to follow him. He had a rolling gait, his hands thrust in the pockets of his blue overalls, a mobile phone clipped to his belt. He was walking toward a dirty oil-drum. When we got there, he lifted aside an old coat. It was concealing from his boss a telescope mounted on a low stand.

  ‘Take a look,’ he said. ‘Handsome birds. Aye, I’m keeping an eye on them.’

  There is a book, and late the other night, when the kids were asleep and the birds at roost, I made a tour through the Internet’s second-hand bookstores, and this morning the postman brought my purchase: J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. Published in 1967, this is a classic of English natural history; a keen, affecting book about a man’s affiliation with his countryside and these particular birds. It’s out of print now, and my copy had travelled up country from Bristol. Written on the flyleaf is the name of the previous owner, John Hunter, which sounds like a folk name for the peregrine himself.

  The hot days continued, but began each morning with a thick damp haar, which smells of the sea, twenty miles away. Early in the morning I watched the female peregrine fly through the mist on whirring wings. She was carrying the carcass of a kill into the recess of her ledge. In the afternoon, when the mist had burned off and the day became hot, I took the book outside, intending to begin it. It was the school holidays, and our children and next door’s were playing in the garden. I settled to read and at once learned that the peregrine’s eyes are bigger and heavier than our own.

  Suddenly a formation of fighter jets sheared overhead. I wanted to cover my ears, but made myself keep listening, to hear what the birds did. My son came running up to me, then came another outrage of noise: three more jets tearing through the pale sky. My son is seven, he wanted to jump in excitement, he wanted to run indoors and draw fighter-planes.

  Later, the radio said that RAF Leuchars had ‘welcomed home’ its Tornadoes from Iraq. Those must have been the very planes that had screamed over our garden, in formation, home from the faraway war we had watched on TV. The jets’ terrible noise had obliterated all else, but the garden birds took up their twitterings at once, greenfinches in the plum trees.

  I looked for the peregrines later, but they were not there. J.A. Baker writes, ‘The peregrine lives in a pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and water.’ I could envy that, sometimes. Later still, my son asked if we were to be bombed. ‘No,’ I said. ‘We will not be bombed.’

  Peregrine falcons kill their prey by diving down on it from above. They have other methods, but this dive, called a stoop, is the most spectacular. They can gain a lot of height, fold their wings and fall through the air at anything up to 150 miles an hour, with a howling sound. The victim, snatched in flight by this terror from above, probably knows nothing. It is knocked cold by the impact, and then killed by a bite through the neck from the hawk’s hooked beak. Though I scan the sky, I have never seen the peregrines hunt. Once, though, I saw the female step off her ledge and drop like a stone into an elder tree forty feet below. The tree exploded with jackdaws.

  By Easter Sunday, the run of hot weather had broken. A bitter east wind blew from the sea. As is the custom, we hard-boiled some eggs and the youngsters painted them, and we went to the park to roll the eggs downhill. Few people were there, though, and we soon dispersed. I saw the male peregrine in the afternoon being pursued round the cliff by a single crow. The crow veered off and went to sit in a tree, but it must have left the peregrine piqued, because he circled alone two or three times more, stooping as though in scorn at whatever happened to be flying beneath him. A jackdaw jinked away with its life. Then the peregrine flew up and away over the hill, and was silhouetted for a long moment against the misty sunlight. An hour later he was back. On another ledge, six feet below, was what looked like a burst cushion, pigeon-pink-grey.

  ‘We’ll pay for it’ – and now how it rains. Streams run in the gutters and top-soil off the fields. The female falcon was hunched under an overhang, with her back turned like a cartoon dunce in a classroom corner, but no dunce she. You could tell she was alert, her head swivelled at every movement. The low cloud brought an almost pleasing melanch
olia. I walked on the hill. Lambs were sheltering under an old hawthorn. But after the rain, two full days of it, came a day so bright and washed clean, everything was rinsed: the sky and trees, gutters and windows, even the splashes of bird lime below the peregrines’ ledge were washed away. In the clear air the male falcon himself looked sharper, his grey back was sleek, his beak and talons buttercup-bright.

  J.A. Baker says peregrines bathe every day in fresh running streams. He spent ten years concerning himself with peregrines in East Anglia, spending whole days roaming the countryside, hiding in ditches, cycling along lanes, examining the carcasses of birds the peregrines had killed to eat. There is not a bird he doesn’t know and cannot evoke. Myself, I keep the binoculars about me, and catch a glance at coffee-time, or before fetching the children from school. Where would I look, if I wanted to find the birds in their peregrinations? Where the falcon hunts or bathes, I have no idea.

  I have no idea either about J.A. Baker, not even his Christian name. He has utterly effaced himself from his book. The book carried the dedication ‘to my wife’ – that is the only clue to his life. But there is almost a tradition in literature of lone men engaging with birds. T.H. White, in his strange memoir of his retreat into falconry, The Goshawk, alludes only to his fear of approaching war; there is Paul Gallico’s affecting Snow Goose. Think of The Bird Man of Alcatraz. As it happens, our local theatre is staging Kes, and there are posters in shop windows which show a boy gazing up at the falcon as it hovers with its tail fanned against an azure sky. Even a book so recent as William Fiennes’ The Snow Geese is a convalescent’s journey.